witches whiskers

After two years without a nest in the corner of the eaves, I am really happy to report that we now have a nesting robin again! Although we nearly didn’t…

This robin (I like to think she might be one of the babies from this post from 2014 or even this one) had a rocky start to her 2017 nesting adventures. She spent several days towards the end of May attempting to build a nest. But it was a dry few days and all the grass she was collecting kept falling to the ground in a big heap (note the pile on the chair, too). She didn’t re-use anything from the heap so it kept getting bigger. And although we have a muddy stream at the back of our garage, she didn’t seem keen to move on to the mud-slinging stage of robin nest building. After three days of work, the nest site remained bare:

And then it rained! And when I got home from work at lunchtime on May 26 she was almost finished her perfect (ish) nest! Hurray! I watched her picking up beakfuls of mud from the edge of the driveway to finish it off just as previous robins have. She left it to dry over the weekend and laid her first egg on Monday, May 29. She’s been away from the nest a fair bit since then, but I notice from re-reading my blog posts from 2013 and 2014 that some of our previous mamas did that, too.